Microsoft’s Ballmer: ‘Competition’ Is Helping Search Business

There’s been more innovation in the Internet search business in the past year than the prior three years, as Microsoft challenged its dominant rival Google in the market, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said.

Bloomberg News

Steve Ballmer earlier this month

Ballmer said the boost in innovation has occurred because of “old-fashioned competition” in the search market, renewed last June when Microsoft introduced its Bing search engine. Ballmer said Microsoft is seeking to improve its roughly 11% market share in the U.S. search market.

Ballmer made the comments in a speech to computer science students at the University of Washington, where he spent most of his time emphasizing how seriously Microsoft is taking “cloud computing,” a trend towards online applications. “For the cloud, we’re all in,” he said.

The Microsoft CEO praised one prominent example of a cloud computing application made by a competitor, Apple’s iPhone App Store, on which that company has done a “very nice job,” Ballmer said.